Case Study: <pagina>

<pagina> is a full-service provider for the publishing industry. We
are primarily concerned with typesetting of books, paperbacks as well as large editions of
scientific works. Since we specialised very early in the field of XML-Production,
XML-Multi-Channel-Publishing, we're one of the leading XML-service-providers for the
publishing industry in Germany.

Description of the challenge:

Five of the biggest publishing houses in Germany wanted to create an XML-based
workflow, covering the whole publishing-process for as good as every product. Including
the authors, the publishing-house itself, a Re-Digitalization-Workflow for older books,
the "normal" typesetting-workflow, an InDesign-XML-Workflow and an E-Book-Workflow. These
things should all work with one single XML-file as a basis. This method is also known as
"Single-Source-Publishing".

How this affected your company?

For a request in this dimension, we had to re-organize some of our production-units.
Setting up this workflow was a big piece of work and a challenge we haven't been faced
with in the past 35 years. We're very clever and efficient in XML-technologies and
production, so the real challenge was the project-management.

What made you choose Oxygen?

To be honest, for this workflow we needed kind of a "transformable" XML-editor. It had
to do everything. It should be a Word-Alternative for the authors, or at least for the
sector. It should support the needs of the proofreader. For these two reasons it had to be
an editor which is quite easy to handle. For sure, we needed the editor in our house as
well. We wanted the developers to work with it and the production to produce with it
(xml-output, epubs, etc.).

So the first big point on the list: The editor has to be configurable with an external
file, to make sure, every user works with the same settings. Oxygen: check. Second point
was to include external programs in the editor to interact directly with the xml-file
without changing to another program, process, or whatever. Oxygen: check. Third point was
to build up a graphical interface for the XML and a Word-like editing menu bar. The
stylable author-mode and the cool CSS extensions were absolutely great for that! Not to
forget to build customized menu-bars with XPATH-XML-Interaction.

What else should I tell? All these demands in one program? Sounds hard for
software-developers, but congratulations, you made it!

How do you describe the selection process?

Actually, there wasn't a big selection process. We worked with Oxygen several
times before and were very positive about this piece of software.

How do you describe the interaction with Oxygen support staff?

Me and my colleagues used the support quite often in the last months. And we were very
happy with it! I think there never was a situation in which the support needed longer than
a few hours to answer our request very professional. Since we reported also a few bugs we
felt very excited to get a beta-version of the 10.2- and 10.3-release to check out whether
or not our reported issues were fixed.

Great support! There's no more words...

How good was Oxygen in solving your problem?

We customized the editor with xpr-project-files, we set up a Word-like user interface
with CSS, the author-mode and the abilities to create menu-bars, we included automatic
transformations in the xpr-file for the XML-transformation to InDesign, we included
external programs to automatically generate E-Books in the EPUB-format including a
jobticket-based workflow. And we got it to work on both PC and Mac.

I think there are no more open problems and all our demands to an xml-editor for all
these processes were completely fulfilled with Oxygen.

Describe the benefits after using Oxygen in your company:

We have no more problems with users using different editor-settings in-house.
IT-support for these issues decreased and we, the tech-team, can focus on more important
things. with the graphical user interface we also improved the productivity in the whole
workflow.